CAMBALACHE.

That the world was and will be a rotten mess, I already know... (In the year five hundred and six and in two thousand too!). There have always been thieves, schemers and swindled fools, the happy and the bitter, true worth and imitation gold... But that the twentieth century is a parade of brazen wickedness, no one can deny anymore. We live tumbled together in one great jumble, all in the same mud, all sullied...

Today it turns out it's all the same to be honest or a traitor!... Ignorant, wise or a thief, generous or a swindler! Everything is equal! Nothing is better! A fool is just the same as a great professor! No one fails and there is no ranking; the immoral have leveled us all. If one lives by deception and another steals out of ambition, it makes no difference whether you're a priest, a mattress maker, a king of clubs, a shameless rogue or a stowaway!...

What disrespect, what an outrage against reason! Anyone is a gentleman! Anyone is a thief! Mixed in with Stavisky comes Don Bosco and “La Mignón”, Don Chicho and Napoleon, Carnera and San Martín... Just as in the disrespectful window of second-hand junk shops, life has been jumbled together; and wounded by a sword without rivets, you see the Bible weeping against a water heater...

Twentieth century, a junk-shop jumble, troubled and feverish!... If you don't cry, you don't get fed, and if you don't steal, you're a fool! Go right ahead! Keep it coming! For there, in the oven, we'll all meet! Don't think anymore, sit off to one side, for no one cares if you were born honest! The one who toils night and day like an ox is the same as the one who lives off others, the one who kills, the one who heals, or the one outside the law...